Radio

That's Shaw business

If you are wearing a poppy the chances are you didn't listen to Peter Tinniswood's powerful one-hander about Remembrance Day, The Admiral of the Night, last Friday.

'I don't want to remember. I want to forget,' says Mr Derbyshire who survived the Somme unlike the 785 other members of his regiment. 'I don't want poppies falling soft and silent over my shoulders. What I want is crows, black crows, pecking and stabbing, feasting, ripping out eyes and entrails, gorging on twitching rising guts. That's all a dead man needs for comfort.'

And when they play the slow march signifying the ritual procession of royals, clerics and Ministers past the Cenotaph, he fires off a long savage raspberry, and the parting salvo: 'Up yours, you bastards.'

Tinniswood is wittier than Alan Ayckbourn, broader than Alan Bennett and in his own way as poetic as Tony Harrison. This was a story simply told about one man's Great War and it's tragic consequences, a modern postscript to Wilfred Owen's 'Dulce Et Decorum' and equally memorable. I wish I felt the same about George Bernard Shaw whose plays such as The Devil's Disciple (Radio 3) I find depressingly dated. Did British army officers in 1777 when the play was set really come out with exclamations like 'Oh poo poo poo'? General Burgoyne sounded more like a character from Lady Windermere's Fan . Shaw himself described the play as a threadbare melodrama which was polite compared to some of the reviews he wrote in his night job as a music critic.

In Invisible Trumpets (Radio 4) we were treated to some of those crits. Here's one of a choral symphony: '... for the most part it was a horrible tissue of puffing and blowing and wheezing and groaning and buzzing and hissing and gargling and shrieking and splattering and grunting and generally making every sort of noise that is incidental to bad singing.'

Easily the best thing about Shaw Week to commemorate the half century since his death was listening to Lorcan Cranitch play GBS with that mixture or irascibility and charm that captured Ellen Terry's heart.

It's only a matter of time I suppose before television snaps up the best radio comedy series for years and just as they did with the League of Gentlemen , can The Sunday Format (Radio 4 ) turn into a small screen flop. Trust me, it won't work. It's too original, too wordy, too clever. It's on every Tuesday: suck it and see for yourself.